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Introduction

Criminal informants provide important information to the justice system, but they also pose serious risks. We hope this website will help attorneys, journalists, advocates, and families to better understand this vital area of public policy.

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WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS

Criminal informants are famously unreliable. Jailhouse snitch testimony often leads to wrongful conviction. Over 45 percent of all innocent people exonerated from death sentences were wrongfully convicted based on the testimony of a lying criminal informant. This makes snitches the leading cause of wrongful conviction in U.S. capital cases.

YOUNG INFORMANTS

Police sometimes use children as young as 14 as informants. These children may be exposed to drugs, violence, and other criminal activities as they work to get information for their handlers. Some have been killed. California and New Jersey have laws restricting the practice: in other states police have discretion to use juvenile informants.

INFORMANT CRIMES

Some informants are serious criminals who receive leniency for their own crimes. The FBI has been known to use murderers as informants. Many jurisdictions permit drug dealers to continue selling drugs in exchange for cooperation. In 2011, the crimes committed by FBI informants alone totaled over 5,600.

URBAN COMMUNITIES PAY THE PRICE

Informants are a staple of drug enforcement. This means that where drug enforcement is heaviest, informant activity is also heaviest. Because drug arrests occur disproportionately in low-income African American neighborhoods, those residents must live with the crime, violence, and distrust that go with criminal informant use.

REFORM

Many states are rethinking their criminal informant policies. Some have passed laws restricting the use of jailhouse snitch witnesses. Some have created new rules for disclosure and accountability. The U.S. Congress is considering a number of reforms that would improve transparency and safety. In the future, the laws governing criminal informants will likely look very different than they do today.

Recent Blog Posts

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Yesterday on CNN, Anderson Cooper reported on the terrible story of 16-year-old Derrion Albert who was beaten to death by four other teenagers in Chicago. The beating was captured on videotape--story here. Four people have been charged so far. Police Superintendant Jody Weis told Cooper that no one has come forward to identify three other potential perpetrators, even though numerous people witnessed the event. Weis stated, "We are literally getting killed by this code of silence, this no-snitching rule. We've worked hard to overcome it." Cooper responded as follows:

This is something we focused on a lot on this program over the years. I did a piece on 60 Minutes about it as well. This whole stop snitching effort, rappers are telling people don't be a snitch. And now the definition of a snitch is not just somebody who is involved in a crime and tries to rat out someone else they were involved with. Now there's this horrible definition of being a snitch is anybody who comes forward and talks about a crime they've seen. That's just the mentality that cannot be tolerated.

"Stop snitching" is an important phenomenon in urban criminal law enforcement; it is also deeper than comments like Cooper's suggest, which is why I devote an entire chapter of the book to it. In a nutshell, "stop snitching" is the legacy of three related trends: drug enforcement's heavy use of criminal snitches, increased gang violence against witnesses, and decades of mistrust between police and poor minority communities. While it is true that rappers often write songs that say "don't snitch," rap music should not be blamed for the fact that law-abiding residents of high-crime inner city neighborhoods are often too afraid of retaliation and/or too wary of police to report crimes. Here is an excerpt from the book:

The "stop snitching" phenomenon turns out to be complex, deep-seated, and long-standing. It did not begin with a DVD or a rap song, nor will it end when "stop snitching" t-shirts go out of style. It is simultaneously a criminal code of the street, a reflection of widespread communal distrust of police, as well as, more recently, a tool of intimidation against civilian witnesses. While the phenomenon was born in the penal system, it has spread beyond its criminal roots, a product of the multifaceted challenges of urban crime, gang violence, race, drugs, and policing through criminal informants.

To explain "stop snitching" is not to condone it--the world would be a better place if Chicago residents had the kind of relationship with police that would promote cooperation and information-sharing. But it is also important to give Chicagoans more credit--like so many people in cities such as Baltimore or Newark or Los Angeles, their reluctance to call police often stems from very real personal as well as historical experiences.